E. D. Hirsch - How to Educate a Citizen: The Power of Shared Knowledge to Unify a Nation

In Memoriam

Richard Rorty

Philosopher and Friend

Author of Achieving Our Country

and

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity

19312007

Dedicated also to

Brain researchers worldwide who have recently determined that our children are born with a big neocortex that is a blank slate upon which is to be written, not by nature or themselves, but by tribal elders:

their ethnicity, morality, competence, and allegiance

The Education of youth is, in all governments, an object of the first consequence. The impressions received in early life, usually form the characters of individuals; a union of which forms the general character of a nation.

Noah Webster, On the Education of Youth in America (1788)

The human being is less endowed with instincts for his guidance than the lower orders of animated creation.

Horace Mann, The Common School Journal 1, no. 1 (November 1838)

The Swiss may speak four languages and still act as one people, for each of them has enough learned habits, references, symbols, memories, patterns of landholding and social stratification, events in history, and personal associations, all of which together permit him to communicate more effectively with other Swiss than with the speakers of his own language who belong to other peoples.

Karl W. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication (1953)

I write this farewell book about American early schooling not just as an educator concerned about the quality of our childrens education, but as an American concerned about our survival as a high-achieving, fair, and literate society. Over my long life, I have always been a booster of the United States, ever grateful for the blessings of liberty secured to us by our Constitution. No nation is without failure or shame, but I believe ours to be the best nation on earthand not just for its spacious skies and amber waves of grain, although these do add to the sense of greatness and possibility. Along with our Constitution, it has been the schoolmistresses and schoolmasters of our paststarting with Noah Websterwho have kept us thriving and unified.

The nation-sustaining enterprise of our schoolteachers must be revived. If this book succeeds in conveying the old message in a new waya message now validated by recent scienceit will joyfully belong to that genre of book that succeeds in elevating rationality and natural science above emotional and religious sentiments of self-righteous certitude and moral indignation. The most recent, quite remarkable science reported in this book should help in that aim. Current brain research and current studies of language show that ethnicity and nationality are far from innate and exclusive properties. Ethnicity and nationality are written on our young neocortical blank slates by adults and experience.

Many Americans have gained more than one ethnicity. Those blank slates, as it turns out, can accommodate multiple ethnicities and identities. The currently popular term identity, regarded as being immutable by birth and experience, is an inadequate concept. The essence of nationality and ethnicity inheres in a speech community that is based on shared knowledge. We must hope that recent scientific determinations (such as the discovery that the brain area where identity and ethnicity reside begins as a blank slate that our parents, our schools, and our surrounding culture write on) will induce a calmer, more productive consideration of what effective nation making and nation sustaining must entail. That is especially pertinent to our multiethnic nation that was once a symbol of human hope, and can be again.

For decades, Ive been a rather polite scholar devoted to explaining how Americas public schools, particularly at the elementary level (which is the focus of this book), are failing to educate our children effectively. The elementary school is decisive for forming both our knowledge base and our gut allegiance. Since the 1960s, our schools have been relying on a progressive approach called child-centered learning promoted and promulgated by our graduate schools of education. Education officials indoctrinated by those ideas set school standards that are unspecific with regard to content. Teachers, similarly indoctrinated, have gradually abandoned teaching knowledge coherently in favor of teaching mush on the scientifically incorrect premise that they are imparting general reading skills and general critical-thinking skills. But by neglecting their citizen-making duties, they are in fact diminishing our national unity and our basic competence.

History, geography, science, civics, and other essential knowledge that is the mark of an educated citizen have been dumbed down by vacuous learning techniques and values-based curricula. The results have been devastating: Its not simply a matter of ignorance (71 percent of Americans believe that Alexander Hamilton was president of the United States). The result is also the loss of a shared knowledge base across the nation that would otherwise enable us to work together, understand one another, and make coherent, informed decisions at the local and national level.

The costs of a broken approach to schooling leave our children underprepared and erode the American Dream. But theres an even deeper cost. Without schooling that teaches shared knowledge, the spiritual bonds that hold our society together are loosened. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. put it this way in The Disuniting of America: The bonds of national cohesion are sufficiently fragile already. Public education should aim to strengthen those bonds, not to weaken them. If separatist tendencies go on unchecked, the result can only be the fragmentation, re-segregation, and tribalization of American life. Public discourse becomes increasingly uninformed and vitriolic, belief in political leadership dramatically declines, and disagreement over policy is translated into demonization of the other.

In the nation as a whole there is now a knowledge gap, a communications gap, and an allegiance gap. We dont understand one another; we dont trust one another; we dont like one another. Every Fourth of July, the Gallup poll reports a further decline in American patriotism and national pride. It has become fashionable to question patriotism and contrast it with a nobler globalism. But I believe mile Durkheim was right to say that the best contributors to international well-being and cooperation are unified, patriotic nations.

Without the anchor of commonality in schooling that we largely had up to the 1940s, our ship of state is heading for a crash that it may not survive. There is already talk of secession. In 2017, in California one-third of polled voters said they would support their state declaring independence and becoming a separate country. In 2016, over a quarter of Texans said the same thing. Other states have prosecession groups campaigning to break away from the union. And while these impulses are not specifically tied to education, only an educated and patriotic citizenry can reverse this impulse.

This book will show that our loss of cohesion is partly owing to a loss of commonality in what we teach and therefore in what we know. At both the local and national level, an economy and a democracy can work effectively only if people understand one another. Language specialists use the term speech community to describe a group of people who share a set of language norms that allow them to interact, share interests, and participate in a healthy community. On a national level, this commonality is missing. The American Dreamthe belief, unique to our nation, that anyone can rise from humble origins to achieve successis fast becoming an American fantasy.